I’ve already talked about my feelings on Greenlight itself elsewhere. But there’s another issue that’s been unfolding across the twitterverse and blogosophere and interwebs in the days since Greenlight’s go-live. It’s starting to feel as if there are two indie communities* out there that share the same name but fundamentally different values. There’s an indie scene of commercially viable and comparably expensive-to-develop titles, and there’s an indie scene of smaller and more intimate games made by developers without the resources, credit, or cash flow of the other.

Whenever things are done in the name of the “indie scene,” both groups believe themselves to be the target audience. And, naturally, this leads to conflict as both groups have radically different expectations of what a game platform is or what it means to create meaningful works. It’s the debate that seems to crop up every year during the IGF nominee announcements – does IGF exist to celebrate the “best of breed” games that are likely to get or already have publishing contracts, or does it have an obligation to highlight smaller titles that won’t otherwise get attention? Greenlight seems to have provoked a similar debate in the indie community, and all of the usual lines are being drawn – only this time it’s tinged with issues of classism and the worth of a work, both because of the whole “$100” issue and because the conflict is over generating sales rather than being featured in a contest.

$100 isn’t that much money, and you really should be able to afford it. Seriously, it’s just $100! That’s like, only a day and a half of minimum wage labor!

If you can’t afford $100, you’re not making a serious game that deserves to be on Steam. I.e., “Come back when your game doesn’t suck.”

The first point shows a complete lack of understanding of poverty or the nature of creating art when absolutely broke. It’s a point made by people who undergo self-induced suffering without understanding those who suffer without a choice. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes may have maxed out their credit cards and risked bankruptcy while working 100 hours weeks when making Super Meat Boy – and that’s not to be made a trifle of. But at the same time, a lot of people interested in the medium of games don’t even have that option. And this is where things get tricky, because you have to be delicate in describing how two white guys voluntarily suffering great pains for their art (and I’ve no doubt they did suffer for their art) is different from someone suffering poverty while making art. But there is a difference, especially when it comes to pulling $100 out of nowhere to place down on something as big of a gamble as the Greenlight service is.

The second point could spiral into its own discussion about the modern aesthetics of the games industry – absolutely obsessed with polish, lush graphics, and a “complete package” more than artful intent or doing a single thing exceptionally well. But more to the point, it assumes an objective measure of quality defined entirely by commercial success that’s being put forward by those who already have it. “Good games always sell” is an easy fallacy to make when your game has successfully sold. But there are plenty of great games that are not currently selling nearly the numbers they probably deserve, and not having access to Steam is certainly not helping.

And combined, I think, it shows that there really isn’t a single cohesive indie block anymore – if there ever was one. Here we have one half of the indie community – the visible half, the half that gets interviewed on Kotaku or Gamasutra, the half you can name-drop to gamers and expect them to follow you – telling the other half that they are functionally unequals. Yes, the particular context is the Steam storefront, but there’s a clear subtext of outright dismissal from commercially successful indie developers when talking to the arthouse developers.

My goal with this article isn’t to call anyone out but to highlight the sort of discourse that is actually taking place in the indie community. A lot of these people have made games that I absolutely adore, and I respect them as creators. But it’s also important to highlight what’s actually being said, and with that in mind here are some tweets from popular indie devs:

Now, these are far from the only indie developers making similar points, but I felt it necessary to include some of the actual language in the discussion, as it’s important in pointing out the condescension taking place. This isn’t a matter of polite disagreement. There’s a vehement insistence that this is a non-issue; that $100 is no big deal and that anyone who disagrees is acting like children. And if you can’t raise $100? Hey, you’re not a serious game developer, or your game isn’t good enough, or you were never going to be commercially viable and therefore your game doesn’t deserve to be sold on the same boutique storefront my game is. Saltsman’s insistence that people who can’t afford $100 are by necessity physically/mentally challenged or foreigners is pretty telling about the privilege that pervades the upper echelons of the indie scene and how little they think of games that don’t have the budgets their games do.

So what does this stratification mean for the indie community? Well, for one, it means that the indie scene is now divided along class lines – an inclusive and amorphous group of students, unpublished indies, hobbyists, and starving artists on the one end and a plethora of small businessmen on the other. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that – making money on your games is not a crime. But there’s a clear difference between someone making a Flash game and hoping the Kongregate ads will help pay rent this month and someone having the ability to scrape together $200k as an investment into their very first indie title. But we still refer to both people simply as “indie developers**,” and increasingly that’s been the source of tension, debate, and misunderstandings.

There has been at least some attempt to span this gap – Dejobaan and others, for example, have tried to raise Greenlight money to support those that don’t have it. But I think as budgets rise even among small titles, we’re going to see the gap widen between the two types of indie developers – those who can afford to treat their passion like a business and those who can’t, those who see money spent on their game as an act of investment and those who see it as an act of fiscal irresponsibility, those who see games as a career and those who see it as a calling. And while everyone wants to be in the former group, it’s important not to declare the latter group illegitimate or undeserving.

* I’m calling it “two communities” for argument’s sake, but in reality it’s more of a gradient. Which is part of the absurdity, really – today’s starving artist might be tomorrow’s superstar who tells the people coming up behind them they can’t sell their game unless it’s already successful, and there are plenty of people that straddle the commercial developer/starving artist line for their entire careers. For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that most indie devs can be rounded to one side or other of this gradient, okay?

** This is not a “what is indie/this guy isn’t indie/this guy is so totally indie” statement. This is more of a “the word indie means such a wide swath of things now, we may need to reevaluate our ability to simply use that one word when developing indie platforms, indie tools, indie business guides, or indie conventions” statement.

39 Comments

September 8, 2012 at 4:43 PM

Great points. It is strange to be a developer of content, and then when you turn to big entities who specialize in content distribution (at the risk of making loads of dollars doing so), being asked to pay a fee. It’s just an awful way to weed out people who aren’t serious.

September 8, 2012 at 7:06 PM

I agree with you, and have recently read this blog post made by the creator of a game that’s now on greenlight (the sea will claim everything) that sits on th side of the 100$ is a crippling sum to ask for.
I suggest you to read it to complete the spectrum on how a developer feels aboout this.
Also the game looks quirk, but really pretty: screenshots gallery

September 8, 2012 at 7:39 PM

I’m not reading this full article but you are completely delusional if you think someone isn’t already privileged for the fact they HAVE a computer, internet connection, presumbly developer software, probably a tablet and a whole bunch of other crap. When you’re working on a project for MONTHS if not YEARS you can cough up 100 dollars. It isn’t like you suddenly have to pay for it. Do you not realize people sit on movies they’ve made for months if not years? That oh my god this is so stupid and you are deliberately ignoring everyone’s points and arguments. But hey go ahead just call me privileged scum while I’ve been dirt poor pretty much my entire life until this last year. Maybe I just “forgot” what being poor was like?

September 8, 2012 at 9:40 PM

Jon, please think for a moment about how you would respond to someone who came onto your blog comments to flame you and started with, “I’m not reading this full article but…”

So long as you’re busy not reading things, you might want to not read what Jonas Kyratzes, Rob Fearon, and Chris Whitman had to say as well. I have a hard time believing that they’re all being whiny, entitled jerks who are out to… get out of paying the Greenlight submission fee?

For me this has been about considering the perspective of someone whose situation might be radically different from my own. I’m just not comfortable assuming that everyone who has complained about it is asking for a handout or being lazy.

September 8, 2012 at 11:07 PM

“I’m not reading this full article but you are completely delusional if you think someone isn’t already privileged for the fact they HAVE a computer, internet connection, presumbly developer software, probably a tablet and a whole bunch of other crap. When you’re working on a project for MONTHS if not YEARS you can cough up 100 dollars. It isn’t like you suddenly have to pay for it. Do you not realize people sit on movies they’ve made for months if not years? That oh my god this is so stupid and you are deliberately ignoring everyone’s points and arguments. But hey go ahead just call me privileged scum while I’ve been dirt poor pretty much my entire life until this last year. Maybe I just “forgot” what being poor was like?”

My point is certainly not that if you’re capable of scraping together $100 you’re “privileged scum,” my point is that there are those for whom scraping together $100 for a ludicrous gamble like Greenlight is simply not an option. And we shouldn’t be dismissive of that fact – these people aren’t the mythical entitled millennials who demand something for nothing out of a misplaced sense of self-entitlement, these are people that live hand-to-mouth and any money earned goes towards any number of living expenses or debts. So many of the indie devs I’ve referenced as dismissive are published, successful, white collar developers who seem to have no empathy or concern for those less fortunate than they, and that’s where I consider the dividing line between these two communities.

I’m not pooh-poohing success, I’m pooh-poohing successful people dismissing those who have not attained their level of success as illegitimate, undeserving, or beneath consideration. I’m pooh-poohing the idea that if you can’t afford a $100 fee to put together enough votes just to get Valve to look at your game your game is therefore a horrible waste of everyone’s time.

I mean, yeah, we can start down the “Well those assholes are privileged too!” path, but it leads to nowhere. There’s always someone worse off – those with $100 are more privileged than those with just technology, those with technology are more privileged than those with just food, those with just food are more privileged than those those who are starving. It’s a black hole that ends in “Why are we talking about videogames when there are starving victims of genocide we could save right now?!” which may be true but is utterly unhelpful to the discussion at hand. There’s always someone better or worse off, and I honestly don’t think the starving kid is worried about whether he could make a videogame that could get onto Greenlight or not. It’s beside the point.

I’d be more open to consideration of arguments from successful indie developers that weren’t outright dismissals. Where are the successful indie devs promoting Desura or Humble Store as the answer? Where are those who argue that these games have a right to be heard but that Steam isn’t an appropriate platform? Where are the intellectual defenses of curation and selective content approval that don’t amount to “Let’s keep the unwashed masses out of the storefront I’m on?” Why is the only advice from these members of the indie community to people who don’t have $100, “Just earn more money!”? Why the insistence that this isn’t an issue at all from major figures in the indie scene, when so many other indies of less financial stability have come out and said it is an issue?

In short: Where are the defenses of Greenlight from successful indie developers that don’t malign, dismiss, illigitimize, or otherwise deride the games and developers for whom Greenlight isn’t an option? And doesn’t the fact that these arguments aren’t happening from members of the indie scene indicate a divide between the haves and the have nots in the indie community?

September 9, 2012 at 2:12 AM

Another issue here is the amount of the fee. If the fee’s purpose is to keep out trolls and pranksters, why does it need to be so steep? Wouldn’t a $10 or $15 fee suffice? That amount of money would be much more affordable to indie developers who aren’t in the best of financial situations.

September 9, 2012 at 2:17 AM

What bothers me on the Greenlight is simple. I’m not the one donating to the charity, Steam is. And donating to charity is tax deductible. So if I fail Steam is earning money, if I succeed Steam earns more money. And all the legwork is done by the users. Don’t try to sell me this as a thing thats to my benefit. That’s dishonest. This is a thing for Steam’s benefit. Steam is a business. It does what businesses do.

September 9, 2012 at 3:35 AM

Let’s say I am an indie devs, who has programmed his entire life and who loves games. Let’s say I’ not rich. Let’s say I have a (not well payed) job to pay my expenses, and I spend all my nights programming and tuning my games. Let’s say that in some way I can afford that $100 even if they are a pretty big investment for me and for my dream. Let’s say I consider this fee a fair one because I think I have a pretty solid fanbase and a good chance to gather the 200k votes required, and I think that the quite high fee could reduce the number of impulse submission of bad games, giving me and my games a greater visibility even if my game is not accepted.

Now, let’s say that another indie developers start complaining about the fee, and start to call me privileged and classist, and he say how the world is unfair for people like him. Let’s say that this dev has made a game with a ludicrous graphic and he has almost no programming skill at all even if he had been a devs for almost 10 years. Let’s say that this guy is a full-time game developers even if, apparently, he couldn’t pay his rent with it. Let’s say that I read him tweet things like “the rich get richer” talking about Greenlight. May I have the right to be pissed at this pompous moron?

September 9, 2012 at 4:57 AM

Completely off topic but I just started to hear your writing in your voice in my head.

On topic: I think the real problem lies in the misinterpretation of Greenlight, something you addressed in the video. Steam didn’t suddenly become an indie games platform, they just figured out that they have a lot of submissions and many of them are hard to judge because of the innovation factor. They don’t do Greenlight to be indie friendly, they do it because they don’t want to miss the next Minecraft. The fee being 100$ rather than 10$ or even 5$ is precisely there to make it more prohibitive, as is the 200k upvote mark (which I imagine will be finetuned later), it means they are not interested in games that would have less than, say, 10k release day sales (I’m making that number up but it is definitely a fraction of the required votes).

I don’t understand why so many devs think they have a “right” to be on Steam and the prohibitive measures introduced into Greenlight are infringing on that right? Not only doesn’t Steam have any kind of “obligation to the community” it is even their right to say, and they do so, “we are not interested in marginal profits.” I imagine once games start making it past Greenlight there will be an entire new set of issues with stuff like free games or in case the dev wants to give out free Steam copies to those who already bought the game through some different channel, especially with titles that are already a few years old and it seems likely that they run through a large portion of their selling course already.

Does Steam say “if your game can’t earn you enough to have a disposable 100$ we’re not interested?” Yes. This is their right, this is their business model. For some reason a lot of people just assumed that Greenlight will turn Steam into a “youtube for games” like Kongregate is. Again, Greenlight is a way for Steam to lessen their own workload and, perhaps even more so, to keep a buzzer for those innovative games that could slip below the radar. Yes, a lot of arguments in favour of the 100$, or a high voting margin, or other prohibitive measures could be more diplomatic. Yes, there is a number of games in the system that I think are well deserving but are doing poor in votes (Immortal Defense and Frayed Knights come to mind). But at the end of the day Steam isn’t asking if your game is good, they’re asking if your game can earn them money.

September 9, 2012 at 5:25 AM

Cards on the table, I’m an upper middle class white male, I’ve never lived below or near the poverty line, and I don’t know many people who have. I still feel the need to air a counterargument though, and it comes in 3 parts. First of all, Steam hasn’t put up any kind of barrier to stop starving artists here, in fact they have vastly lowered the barrier to entry from what it was before Greenlight. Before it didn’t matter if you had $100 or not you didn’t have a great chance of getting your game looked at, now there is an option, albeit one that may be expensive to some. Secondly, unlike starving artists in any other field, game design already costs money to get into. You need a good computer to design with, dev kits if you’re doing any kind of handheld or console integration, presumably an internet connection, a code signing license depending on your language of choice, if you’re a flash dev you have to buy a license for Flash, etc etc. If the money spent on that is more important than the necessities of life this hypothetical person chose them over, then why is this $100 a roadblock? Thirdly, if they have a good product then finding a small investor shouldn’t be the thing stopping them from competing in the marketplace. If we take all these together we’re left with a very tiny minority of game developers who are negatively effected by this, we’re likely talking single digits here. And if inconveniencing those few people helps improve the user experience of everybody else, I don’t really think that’s a problem.

September 9, 2012 at 9:38 AM

The part that “Pissed Dev” neglects to mention about my badly-programmed game with the terrible graphics is that it’s won quite a bit of critical acclaim and has a fanbase that cares a great deal about it – but that this doesn’t translate to me having a whole lot of money. (Because of the themes my games address, many of my fans happen to be from poor countries and lower economic backgrounds, and even paying the $10 to buy the game itself is a big investment to them.)

The same goes for developers considerably more acclaimed than myself. (Rob Fearon’s post is necessary reading.)

It’s ironic that this person feels so very threatened for people pointing out that not everyone in the world lives in the same way. No-one accused anyone of being classist for having the money to submit to Greenlight. We only accused them of being classist when they said that the rest of us didn’t have the right to say we don’t.

September 9, 2012 at 10:10 AM

It smells like a large part of the conflict this has generated is as a result of differing interpretations of what the Steam store is; on one hand it’s a mechanism for _selling_ games (even free to play’s usually have a revenue stream somewhere), one the other it’s a great distribution system for finding and enjoying games. The key is that it is both these things, a high-street store is one, kongregate is another, Steam is both. The small indie dev games must be commercially viable, or they’re barking up the wrong tree.

Steam is the big player in controlling the channel to games, but it’s not the only way. No one is being censored by this. If you have an non-commercial art game, then give it away on your website, have a tip-jar. If you think it can turn a profit, but you need financial aid to help get it to market, then welcome to the world of entrepreneurship, you probably need an investor, try friends, family, crowd-funding, or a bank.

It takes money to make money, and Steam is about money. Art games or early stage games need somewhere else to go, and that’s not a bad thing, that’s a different community, with different aesthetics, feedback and most crucially no commercial pressure, you know, that thing that originally made us love indie games?

September 9, 2012 at 11:08 AM

Internet is cheap, you can easily get by on an old computer if you’re not doing a game with demanding graphics and while there are plenty of platforms and development tools that cost money, there are also plenty that are not.

And finally, disregarding that, the money spent on those things are a concrete sum spent on the game. The Greenlight $100 is not a hundred dollars to get on Steam, it’s a hundred dollars to get on Steam’s porch hoping Steam’s friends will let you in. Stupid comments and negative ratings is something I can get for free on youtube.

September 9, 2012 at 4:19 PM

Really? The “critic acclaimed and the fanbase you care a great deal” is your argument? First, if you read the reviews of RPS, they didn’t exactly flay their hands clapping; second, a lot of bad books have a fanbase, sometimes huge, that care a great deal about them (atlas shrugged, the hunger games, twilight,…).

If you treat your peers with contempt and a misguided sense of moral superiority, as lesser than human (“But it is not up to me to force them to behave like human beings, to have respect and understanding for others”), don’t expect empathy or anything else…

September 9, 2012 at 7:30 PM

September 10, 2012 at 2:58 AM

Heartless as it may be, I have to side with the ‘privileged’ on this one. I read Jo’s article and this particular point got to me:

“Poor is when every cent you earn goes to buying you another day under a roof, not to a gamble disguised as an investment. Why don’t we have a hundred dollars from selling ten games? Because we need to live.”

I know exactly what he’s talking about because that’s exactly how I’m living now. After only just getting a $8/hr job after two years of unemployment (six months of which have been spent living off of the handouts of others), I’ve been exactly where he’s talking about and I can tell you if that’s the life you’re living, you have no business wasting time making a goddamned videogame, let alone complaining about a $100 barrier of entry.

There is no such thing as a non-privileged video game developer…indie or not. The resources required to create even the most basic video game demands a level of access that the poverty Jo described simply would not provide. First, the level of programming knowledge obviously means a college education. Privilege. You could argue a public library with free internet, but no matter what you know, or how you know it, you still need the tools to make that game. You NEED a computer. Privilege. You need the software to program the game and create the art assets. Privilege. You need the internet to use Greenlight in the first place. Privilege. For the minimum amount of money required – REQUIRED – to create the most basic videogame, you can live at least half of year. This, to say nothing of the job opportunities available to those with the skills required to accomplish such a task.

Now if the argument were framed in the context of a business decision, I’d be a lot less reticent, but it’s not. It really does come off like the have-nots in this case simply want to engender sympathy rather than provide a proper argument of how this is a bad business decision. Well, you don’t own Steam guys. Valve can charge whatever they want. Welcome to the free market.

Harsh? Yes, but so is reality and the reality is that video games are a form of entertainment. They are not vital. In the grand scheme of things, it’d be laughable to even call them important. When push comes to shove they SHOULD be the first thing to go in whatever pursuits you have in life. They are not worth starving yourself over. They are superfluous. That’s what people mean when they say get a ‘real’ job, because – as I noted – the skills needed to make a videogame open a lot of doors to other far more stable avenues of employment. However, if you would rather diet on ramen in pursuit of your dreams, fine. Just don’t blame Steam or anyone who calls you out on it. That’s not privilege.

September 10, 2012 at 7:37 AM

I’d love to live somewhere where my computer and internet connection could pay for six months of food, but that’s just not the case.

Not having $100 for Greenlight doesn’t mean someone has no money what so ever, but it’s one thing to pay for something concrete like tools, or the possibility to publish your game, another entirely to pay a $100 to post a trailer and hope the Steam community votes for it.

September 10, 2012 at 12:05 PM

What Zukhramm said. For a creator for whom money is tight, why would you drop $100 for the chance a small community of anonymous internet critics–clearly an illustrious body of cultural critics sans pareil–might like your game? You could drop the same amount to join Apple’s Developer program and have your game’s approval be essentially guaranteed (assuming you don’t trip one of Apple’s handful of red flags like pornography or malware). Although iPhones are pricey little gadgets, while someone with the right connections and skills can put together a decent PC for chump change.

And really, calling a PC a “privilege” in this day and age? My friend has a crappy old car that needs a couple hundred dollars of repairs every few months. But he can’t buy a better one until he can save up enough from his new job. But he needs a car to find work in his field, because they send him all over the place. But it’s hard to save for a better car when the current one keeps sucking away his savings. Is he still “privileged” to own that car? Without it, he’d be unemployed and homeless in a matter of months. Ever think some of these “have-not” devs are struggling IT techs/web devs in their day job who need a PC for their paying work? When Harrison Ford was making cabinets to feed his family while waiting for the acting thing to pan out, were his carpenter’s tools a “privilege”?

You need a college education to know programming? That sounds like someone trying to justify the cost of their Comp Sci degree. The likes of Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Ellison, and Zuckerberg were the guys who skipped class or dropped out so they could do more coding. Parker and Fanning were working on Napster while they were still in high school.

If Valve’s intention is to snag the next Angry Birds, they’re doing it wrong. The next Angry Birds could be sitting on Newgrounds right now, made by a couple of broke teenagers with access to their school’s computer lab. Why not call this what it is: crowd-sourcing the curation process, i.e. laziness. Sure, it’s okay for Valve to pass the buck by getting the customers to do the work a paid employee should be doing (and finagle a nice tax break at the same time), but a couple guys cry foul because they balk at a fee that amounts to a chance to be rated by the likes of YouTube commenters and they’re whiners.

At least with Apple you get a human being giving you the once over before punching your ticket and letting you on board. With Valve, your ticket gives you a message in a bottle that might be picked up if it’s not too dark outside, and your bottle is the right colour as decided by the peanut gallery on deck.

September 10, 2012 at 9:10 PM

I’d argue that PissedDev’s point still stands. Valve isn’t a charity. Games are a luxury commodity. If you can barely afford $10 to buy a game, you have other problems that need to be solved before you start trying to entertain yourself with frivolities. This is why I haven’t bought or hardly played a game in almost two years I’m investing my time and money in attending university.

Someone like me, or someone worse off, is not going to make Valve any money off sales. So if the broke or impoverished are the only market a game can attract (which seems utterly bizarre) then there’s no reason for them to even give it a chance. If a title truly has a decent sized fanbase who have bought it for $10 a copy then there isn’t any reason you couldn’t get the $100, and spend a little time learning how to effectively market your game. Valve isn’t offering to sell everyone’s games, they’re offering to sell games that can prove upfront that they will be reasonably profitable.

I don’t think PD’s threatened, and it’s not irony either. PD is pointing out that he has every right to be frustrated with people who (supposedly) don’t have the $100 Greenlight fee claiming that they should still be allowed to use the service to market their games. Lowering the barrier to entry would, as he points out, reduce coverage for everyone, and leave Valve hosting a million crap games just like the ApStore.

We haven’t even begun to to talk about the possible liability issues for Valve if they were to simply let anyone upload a game in the same way Youtube handles videos or eBey et al manage sales. Unlike any of the example services Chris mentions, Valve is selling products that directly alter the customer’s computer, the possible exploits are practically endless. Look at the aftermath of the PSN hack on Sony, I don’t think Valve wants the cost of a similar headache.

September 11, 2012 at 5:00 AM

[…] Errant Signal: But I think as budgets rise even among small titles, we’re going to see the gap widen between the two types of indie developers – those who can afford to treat their passion like a business and those who can’t, those who see money spent on their game as an act of investment and those who see it as an act of fiscal irresponsibility, those who see games as a career and those who see it as a calling. And while everyone wants to be in the former group, it’s important not to declare the latter group illegitimate or undeserving. […]

September 11, 2012 at 10:57 AM

September 11, 2012 at 8:45 PM

Indie games are sold internationally over the Internet, (primarily) in US dollars. This means that if you live in a poor country, it’s actually hugely easier to support yourself and cover your living expenses. If you are a fulltime developer who supports yourself through your games, you are certainly in no worse position than someone in a rich country when it comes to amassing the $100 fee.

September 13, 2012 at 5:31 AM

I think we’ll see the rise of the 2nd tier indie scene, that is mid-range budget titles that are enough to satisfy gamers used to AAA titles, and not up for experimentation quite yet. The smaller, intimate, experimental titles will be a place where ideas develop, come from, and the mid-tier (10-30 dollar) downloadable title will be the place for “cheap, but fun” games.

September 13, 2012 at 10:34 AM

“you have to be delicate in describing how two white guys voluntarily suffering great pains for their art (and I’ve no doubt they did suffer for their art) is different from someone suffering poverty while making art.”

Why did you bring skin color into this? You’re stereotyping dark-skinned people as being poverty-stricken masses.

September 15, 2012 at 9:50 AM

September 15, 2012 at 2:25 PM

I have a theory as to why the higher-end indie developers are taking this kind of stance on the $100 issue. I think it has to do with the fact that these ‘upper echelons’, as Campster put it, still imagine themselves as being part of the indie scene.

To most people, being an indie means being The Underdog, the person suffering the most, the person with the smallest chances. Everything you do as The Underdog is a great trial, and everything you succeed at doing should be hailed as an amazing triumph.

But what about when The Underdog actually becomes successful, and has much more to work with? Well, because they’re still allowed to keep their ‘indie’ title, the only thing that changes is the circumstances, not the mindset. These people still see themselves as being the lowest rung, the ones who have it the worst, and with this mindset you literally cannot grasp the concept that others have it harder than you. It gets to the point that, as we can see with these people’s tweets and blog posts and such, they will actively shoot down the concept that someone else can’t achieve what they can in the same situation, or posit that there must be some unjustifiable excuse as to why they don’t have the resources (‘your game sucks anyways’, or ‘you must be physically/mentally ill or a foreigner’).

September 27, 2012 at 9:28 AM

Hey, you have a blog now! That means I get to comment on month-old posts so nobody will read me…

“…The first point shows a complete lack of understanding of poverty or the nature of creating art when absolutely broke. It’s a point made by people who undergo self-induced suffering without understanding those who suffer without a choice. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes may have maxed out their credit cards and risked bankruptcy while working 100 hours weeks when making Super Meat Boy – and that’s not to be made a trifle of. But at the same time, a lot of people interested in the medium of games don’t even have that option. And this is where things get tricky, because you have to be delicate in describing how two white guys voluntarily suffering great pains for their art (and I’ve no doubt they did suffer for their art) is different from someone suffering poverty while making art…”

This is the point where I went “aha” and realized exactly where you and I differ. You see a distinction where I believe none exists.

Indulge me while I give a brief life history for context. I come from a poor family. My father is disabled and at the time of my birth my mother was a teenage prostitute (she has improved her lot since then, though there has still never been a point in her life where she’s managed a legitimate salary higher than $12/hour), and I spent more of my youth being passed from relative to relative than I spent with my biological progenitors. I am the first person in my mother’s side to go to college (I was only beaten by my aunt on my father’s side, who got a degree in nursing from a community college after her husband died). At my lowest point of childhood poverty, I had the ignominious privilege of listening to my brother and sister cry from being hungry while a medical condition required me to eat.

In addition to my own personal experience, my wife (who came from a family even poorer than mine) has a post-graduate degree in sociology with focus on the causes and the effects of social stratification. As the devout husband with a degree in Computer Engineering, I have spent countless hours writing and debugging software for analyzing inequality and even more hours proofreading academic papers that theorize on the exact causes and consequence of class competition.

In short, I know poverty, both from anecdotal experience and from my close familiarity with the cold hard statistics of inequality, as well as a passing familiarity with the theory of inequality. Here are some examples of what someone in poverty in the United States looks like:

–An experienced laborer whose job got outsourced to China where labor is cheaper, who doesn’t have the money to afford switching careers.
–An untrained laborer who saw their hours, salary, and benefits cut because private unions have no power in the wake of outsourcing (which applies to service industries as much as it applied to manufacturing), who doesn’t have the money to afford career advancement.
–A child from a family too poor to afford college unaided, who will never go to college no matter how smart they are because their underfunded public schools can’t afford the extracurricular activities, academic prep courses, or paid advocates required to be granted a scholarship.
–Anyone unfortunate enough to be born with a genetic predisposition to diseases, the costs of which make obtaining any sort of marketable skills a pipe dream.
–Families who invested in homes under false pretenses, being all but lied to by banks who raised their payments by exorbitant amounts when the crash hit, the costs of which make obtaining any sort of marketable skills a pipe dream.
–Adults who either washed out of college or chose to major in a field that doesn’t provide opportunities for employment post-crash, but yet are still saddled with massive debt

In short, poor people aren’t poor because they have little money. They are poor because our society does not provide any adequate means by which someone who is in poverty can improve their condition. This category of people does NOT include indie developers, who by their very nature must at the very least be skilled in software development and computer programming, two of the most if not THE most highly demanded professions by today’s economy. As a little experiment, go to your preferred job-finder site , type in “junior programmer,” and see how many results you get. And, to head off protestations regarding the global nature of poverty, do another search for “junior programmer” positions that allow telecommuting, requiring only that you have an internet connection to get a paycheck.

I ran this experiment myself in multiple job boards, and found no fewer than 500 jobs at brick and mortar firms, and no fewer than 200 jobs that can be done from anywhere across the globe. Most of these jobs offer excess of $40,000/year, along with full-time benefits. The only thing making poor indie developers poor is their choice–a choice people who are REALLY poor don’t get–to forgo a stable, paying job to pursue their passion. While I respect them for their dedication to their art, I do not sympathize with their plight because they could quite easily (compared the the rest of the world, at least) make money if that’s what they chose to do.

When it comes to issues of inequality, I am about as liberal as they come in standing for the rights of the disadvantaged. Nevertheless, my heckles raised when I read this post (seriously, I felt a little prickle at the back of my neck as they went up). You aren’t combating the injustice of inequality, you are trivializing it by lumping people who gave up their incomes to pursue their dreams in with people who never had a chance at a decent income to begin with, propagating the (very harmful) idea the poverty is just a lack of money, when in fact it is a result of institutionalized discrimination against those who cannot afford to advance themselves.

Then on top of that, you provide a vexing, albeit elegant, strawman in the form of the “successful” indies who are acting like dismissive elitist pigs, and ascribe everyone (like me) who doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with charging $100 for Greenlight in with these elitist philosophies that lacks “understanding those who suffer without a choice.”

November 20, 2012 at 6:21 AM

I agree with analysis you make of the elitism and condescendence of the “arrived” part of the indie community. This is nothing new, we’ve seen this happen already with the youths of ’68 dismissing the next generation aspirations while stock trading in the ’80s.

But, as basically every time you post something, you criticize without proposing an alternative. It’s not your job, granted, but it’s kind of useless to criticize the 100$ barrier if you can’t figure out a better way to avoid Greenlight becoming a spam-infested 4chan software trading board with an awful SNR.

Besides, I don’t follow you near the end, if you want to code games as a business, then 100$ is the least you will have to fork in your career. If you aren’t doing it for business but only for yourself, for the sake of art or whatever, then you don’t have to fork this 100$ to sell a product, don’t you? Sure, it may help you to sell a few copies, but Valve isn’t social security, they don’t have to give everyone a right to build a better future for themselves or anything O_o So, if you don’t have 100$ to pay for Valve’s service to you, then just go to forums and social media and get free promotion.

February 11, 2013 at 6:53 AM

April 14, 2013 at 9:30 AM

Have you ever considered that maintaining the ‘app store’ or Youtube of video games may be extremely difficult? The idea that, if Valve were to open up their system, the cream would automatically rise to the top is okay in theory, but Valve is not exactly a huge, multinational corporation like Apple is. They can’t spare hundreds of people to playtest and constantly maintain a never-ending stream of Indie games. If they were to simply open up the floodgates, suddenly hundreds of people would be asking them for support for games they haven’t even checked, their servers would be put under huge strain from all the new downloads, and all of the problems at the start with ‘prank games’ would be back, and nearly uncontrollable. The $100 fee was put into place for that exact purpose: stop all of the spam and fake games coming in.